tion forty years earlier, when he pictured the democracy as brutal, boisterous, boastful, ignorant, and hypocritical. He made no effective reply to Carlyle, who had cried twenty-two years later than Dickens, 'My friend, brag not yet of our American cousins! Their quantity of cotton, dollars, industry and resources, I believe to be almost unspeakable; but I can by no means worship the like of these.'
Matthew Arnold, a critical friend of ours, far more friendly to our political institutions and to our social organization than Carlyle, dropped in upon us at about the time that Carnegie published his book. 'The trouble with Carnegie and his friends,' said Arnold, 'is that they have no conception of the chief defect of American life; namely, that it is so dreadfully uninteresting.' This dullness, he explained, was due to the average man's quite inadequate conception of the good life, which did not go beyond being diligent in business and serving the Lord—making money and observing a narrow code of morality.
The particularly hopeless aspect of our case, Arnold thought, was that we, as a people, seemed quite unconscious of our deficiencies on the human side of our civilization. We displayed a self-satisfaction which is 'vulgarizing
